Ever since the times of IRC, there has been a need to categorize specific messages on the internet. With the rise of the social web and increased amounts of information, this habit became even stronger. First popularized by Twitter, the hashtag was introduced in 2007, and since then, found its way into standard offering of the most popular social services (Instagram, Tumblr, Google+, etc.). It seems even Facebook will introduce its own version soon, though people already use them overthere anyways. The hashtag changed the way we create and consume content, and it became a symbol of collaborative publishing in the social era.

Before I proceed with this rant, I would like to point out that I strongly believe in social media. I think it can do magical things, hell, we've already seen it has the potential to change the world. But that's just me, a person consuming information, deciding what's real and what not, riding those waves that I like. The media - they should try harder - it's their job to report the truth. In the past few weeks, we've encountered a few slips from the mainstream media here in Slovenia, feeding us with bogus information they've copied from the (social) web. I know it can be hard to track everything that's going on, but still, double-checking a few things and sources wouldn't hurt that much. And since Slovenia is in a quite critical stage at this point, with a fucked up financial situation, austerity measures, protests and everything, this makes it even more important for journalists to do their job properly.

I've always been a big fan of the power of the crowds. When a mass of people can achieve much more than a few skilled individuals can. And ever since we've started playing with Twitter's API, I've been think about the possibilities of this magnificent data source. Besides Twenity, we've done a few other Twitter mashups like Twitter walls, but this wasn't enough. We wanted something more - geolocation. Displaying information on a map in real-time. But since there aren't that many tweets equipped with GPS coordinates, we needed to include other services for more diversity as well. Which we did, and Ljubljana Realtime, a social event discovery application, was born.